Tag: google labs

Web applications have evolved from simple HTML pages into rich, interactive applications that provide a great user experience. Today’s web apps pose a challenge for developers, however: how do you create and maintain efficient JavaScript code that downloads quickly and works across different browsers?

The Closure tools help developers to build rich web applications with JavaScript that is both powerful and efficient. The Closure tools include:

A JavaScript optimizer

The Closure Compiler compiles JavaScript into compact, high-performance code. The compiler removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left so that it downloads and runs quickly.

A comprehensive JavaScript library

The Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. You can pull just what you need from a large set of reusable UI widgets and controls, and from lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and more.

An easy template’s system for both Java & JavaScript

Closure Templates simplify the task of dynamically generating HTML. They have a simple syntax that is natural for programmers.

Closure Templates are implemented for both JavaScript and Java, so that you can use the same templates on both the server and client side. For the client side, Closure Templates are precompiled into efficient JavaScript.

How does this work?

Google have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time.

Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

Google have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. Google compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often Google see these search queries, Google can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

Back in 2001, Google had made things a lot easier for the internet community to search for images via the Image Search option. According to the latest reports from the Official Google Blog, that service has been developing and one of the newer updates was called Similar Images which enabled users to find a larger variety of pictures according to what they were looking for. But the Google Labs have been buzzing some more and a new experimental feature that they’re testing, called Google Image Swirl, allows for research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.

The new search option allows you to further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. It’s a wheel like design that’s easy on the eyes and simple to use. Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of image